An Author `Blessed` By Unhappiness

November 25, 1986|By Peter Gorner.

Meeting big, shambling Pat Conroy is a jolt--he comes across as a curious mix of tough Chicago Irishman and laconic deep southerner. But the blend ably suits a writer, if you stop and think about it, especially a poetic and perceptive novelist who makes millions of people laugh through their tears.

``My father was a Chicagoan who got sent to Atlanta by the marines during World War II,`` Conroy says. ``While he was out on Peachtree Street hustling broads, as he so elegantly phrases it, my mother, 17 years old, crossed the street to catch a bus and walked into her hideous history.

``Now I must tell you the southern part of my family does read my books, at least to page four, or whenever I start using those words. These are classic Baptists. When they went to church they felt bad if they came out without having kissed a rattlesnake. When they come to booksignings, they quote from the Gideon Bibles they`ve stolen from motels across the South, and beg people, for the love of God, not to buy my book.``

Conroy insists he was ``blessed`` by an unhappy childhood and an interesting family, the origins of his grief and joy. ``As a military brat, I never lived a day in a home town. Of course, I had to grow up before I realized how fascinating it all had been. I`ve since come to demand that all my friends be outrageous and lead horrible, wonderful lives, so I can use them, too.``

Four novels have come so far, and three films--the classic ``Conrack,``

``The Great Santini,`` and ``The Lords of Discipline.`` Because he couldn`t help noticing that the screenwriters were getting paid more than he was, Conroy is writing his own screenplay for his new novel, ``The Prince of Tides.`` Not a bad parlay for a self-styled southern rustic only 41 years old. ``My family and life are now interconnected, not only with literature and writing, but also with movies,`` he notes. ``Everyone in the family fully expects to be in a movie or have someone play them in a movie.``

But Conroy paid a price, growing up in a household ruled by an obsessive mother and a gung-ho Marine Corps fighter pilot who physically abused his seven kids. Forced to attend 11 different schools in 13 years, Conroy ended up as a rare English major at the Citadel in Charleston, developing a love-hate relationship with what he describes as one of the most brutal military academies in the South. Upon graduating, to dodge the Vietnam draft (even his father viewed it as ``a politician`s war``), Conroy took a job teaching illiterate black children in a two-room schoolhouse on a sea island off the coast of South Carolina.

The kids called him ``Conrack.``

``I worked with them,`` he has written, ``in an environment of glinting magnolias, unpaved roads, oxcarts, blue herons haunting the fringes of the marsh, and the Atlantic Ocean washing against the eastern shoreline of the island. The lyricism darkened when I learned that the children in my class did not know they lived in the United States, that the world was round, that the Atlantic Ocean formed one boundary of their island, and lots of other trivia that seemed to me to be basic to a child growing up in the 1970s. On the other hand, they marveled that I did not know how to slaughter a hog, skin a possum, plant okra or set a trap.``

A dynamic and unconventional teacher, Conroy strived mightily to bring the kids of Daufuskie Island into the 20th Century, but it didn`t end well. After a year, his boss fired him--``it was southern white against southern white, him against me.`` Thus was Conroy, in his fire-breathing prime, left with nothing but a story.

The island residents have since been displaced by fancy condos and a new Jack Nicklaus golf course, but Conroy did enjoy some small revenge. The school superintendent was fired after Conroy`s book came out in 1972, and Conroy did get to watch Jon Voight play him on the screen.

``Jon has a face sculpted by the hands of God,`` Conroy notes with envy.

``My face came from a throw of dice in the genetic cup, and I generally prefer hanging around ugly people.``

Since ``Conrack,`` Conroy has been exorcising ghosts, exposing painful family secrets, gradually being forgiven. He thinly fictionalized his parents` marriage, which he calls ``a cruelty of fate,`` in ``The Great Santini.``

But most of all, when Conroy thinks back, he remembers Mama.

Peg Conroy once told him that all of southern literature could be summed up in a few words: ``On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.``

``I`m a writer because my mother wanted me to be,`` Conroy says. ``I think that`s pretty unusual. I did not grow up in a house of books, but my mother haunted the library. She read to all of us constantly. My earliest memory is her reading `Gone with the Wind` aloud to us at bedtime. The greatest book ever written, she thought.